Dyslexia: New Research Revealed Intensive Reading Classes Could Help Manage Dyslexia

Director of Georgetown University Center for the Study of Learning, Guinevere Eden, carried out a research to examine the difference on the brains of people with dyslexia and find a way to rewire the human brain function. The findings suggested that children who suffer from dyslexia can undergo intensive reading training or tutoring to manage the disorder.

Eden explained that learning to read requires different parts of the human brain to be trained in recognizing letters before it relate them to sounds. The human brain will then blend the sounds into words but this process does not easily happen to people with dyslexia.

Eden, along with a team of researchers, focused on an eight-year-old girl named Tiffany Hilton and studied how the parts of her brain lights up as she performed several short reading exercises. Eden concentrated on the temporoparietal cortex and occipitotemporal cortex of her brain which apparently do not light up the same way a typical reader's brain does.

It was revealed that brains of people with dyslexia have under-activated temporoparietal cortex and occipitotemporal cortex. The temporoparietal cortex plays a role in processing spoken language while the art occipitotemporal cortex is important in the brain's visual processing center.

Both of these human brain parts do not function the same way in dyslexic. So, Eden proposed a six-week intervention that required children with dyslexia to attend a tutoring class. The children underwent reading exercises along with letter and number manipulations.

This was done in the director's attempt to rewire human brains of people with dyslexia to do what it was not "designed" to do, NPR reported. Eden and her team of researchers took brain scans of the children prior the classes to compare the brain activities at the end of the six-week intervention.

The study found that the brain's left hemisphere became more active. Additionally, new areas of the brain in the right hemisphere started to help out in the reading process as well. Eden came up with a conclusion that intensive reading tutoring may change the way the brains of children with dyslexia read.

What can you say about the newly proposed brain retraining to manage dyslexia? Do you believe that medical research and studies can one day find treatment to combat the learning disability?